Quorum and decorum

Here's another source of side income for our elected representatives. And, it won`t invite disciplinary action from whichever form, shape and collar size of Lokpal we finally get.

Here's another source of side income for our elected representatives. And, it won`t invite disciplinary action from whichever form, shape and collar size of Lokpal we finally get.

Corporators, MLAs and MPs may have entered education big time and made big bucks, but they haven`t set up schools to impart the skills they have picked up in the course of their day job. This transfer of technique has happened only unintentionally and unfavourably.

They have been branded the brand ambassadors of crime, creative accountancy, and customised suitcases designed to fit any requirement for currency notes of any denomination for the discerning VIP. But how could they be turned into worthy and hands-on teachers to serve a primordial schoolboy need?

The answer came to us in a week of front pages filled with the usual suspects of political sleazepertise — from cash-for-votes to the original Sukh Ram genre of stash-for-telecom. Data dug out by a couple of diligent TOI reporters revealed the abysmal attendance record of elected members of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

At least 31 of the BMC`s 227 corporators had bunked more than 55% of the 73 meetings held during the last financial year. The attendance percentage of six corporators was in single digits. Obviously, these truant guys `n` bais have something valuable to teach the most brazenly bindaas schoolboy and college dude.

These kids have to repeat a year and are barred from taking seminal exams for not having toted up the mandatory percentage of attendance. But our wayward corporators get no such punishment. They do have to give `reason for absence`, but, clearly, they don`t need to come up with imaginative excuses.

At least some of them honestly said that they couldn`t attend BMC meetings since they had become MLAs. But all the other ploy-boys cited the usual `indisposition`, and, on occasion, the equally fake `Mother`s condition serious`.

Since various departments of the BMC control the means of production of Mumbai`s serial illnesses, it is entirely possible to create a minor epidemic should corporators want to take a few days off to recover from the rigours of their position. Why, anyway, should they be asked for reasons when they so fully deserve a break from the mind-bending and rule-bending concentration needed to commit their daily sins of omission and, more so, of commission? The latter is usually to the tune of Love Me Tender. `Who this Elvis-Pelvis is we are not knowing. You simply pay 10% now or never expect the contract.`

The BMC is not alone in the truant universe. Corporators, MLAs and MPs across the nation have so perfected this art that it has acquired the ennui of everyday ordinariness. So, no one can question their qualifications for setting up private Playing Hooky academies.

Who is better placed than them to set up as many of these as are needed to meet the demand of every schoolboy in the land? Since these worthies are both applicant and sanctioning authority, they don`t have to worry about the plethora of licences that plagues ordinary mortals. Acquiring prime space in land-squeezed cities will be no problem either. All they have to do is de-reserve a plot meant for a municipal school or playground, and allot it to themselves.

The self-righteously indignant will denounce the immorality of public servants privately tutoring the future generation to shirk instead of work. Tick them off by asking whether corporators/MLAs/MPs should set up schools for bribery and corruption instead.There`s only one danger. A Playing Hooky academy run by this cadre may have even more than the usual quota of truant teachers. By Bachi Karkaria